Is Sleep.FM a Sign that Bubble 2.0 is Close to Exploding?

I love innovation, entrepreneurship, risk-taking, etc and I get annoyed when people "hate on" people willing to take a chance and try something that maybe a bit out there, different or just plain bizarre. At the same time, I'm a realist. This maybe due to my time at dot bomb, Kozmo.com, or due to my time managing American Express' innovation fund. Nevertheless, I do try to understand if a business has some solid fundamental underpinnings, e.g, it can provide a decent answer to "How will I one day make money? or at least answer "Do a lot of people really need this?" since money isn't always the end goal a la Craig's List.

I'm a big fan of these questions because I used to work, as mentioned, at a startup called Kozmo.com in my younger days, and Kozmo's business model essentially was that we'll deliver stuff to your door in less than an hour and if it costs $10, we'll sell it to you for $9 in the hope that the economics would work if the volumes were great enough. Perhaps I was too stupid, too naive or too drunk off the internet kool-aid to realize that this is not a business model but I merrily worked alongside numerous other smart people toiling away in the hopes that some day our -$1 profit per order would create the next great company and make us all fantastically rich. The final headlines were just a bit different.

So that brings me to Sleep.FM which bills itself as "a sleep and wake social network, where your friends' alarm messages wake you up!" Basically, Sleep.FM aims to put the traditional alarm clock out of business by letting people record wake up messages from their friends, wives, kids, etc. Before we dissect this, let me say that I want to hear from folks who think I may just be way way wrong. I'd love to be convinced otherwise because Ryan Spahn, the CEO and founder and Muthu A, CTO, both seem like genuinely good guys esp Ryan whose blog on the site is very honest and straightforward and lacking any 'spin'.

But here goes the dissection:

I need another social network like I need a hole in my head. Problem #1. Plus this isn't really a social network. You are asleep and you wake to your kid's voice. There is no social in that and there is no network. I guess friends could record your wake up messages and they could be funny and you'd laugh and so that is social. Perplexed.

I see no revenue model or nothing that is very compelling. Users are asleep so no chance of putting advertising in front of them and becoming a billionaire off their clicks (highly dubious in any case). Maybe they will come to the site to schedule their wakeups but small to no advertising dollars here. Will it be a software as a service (SaaS) model where every time you use Sleep.FM, they'll make a penny or two? Fully confused.

This isn't sticky. If you are a consultant always traveling, sure it might be nice to hear your kids waking you up. If your a college kid, it might be entertaining to wake up your friends with this. But after the first few times, the cuteness might wear off and this gets thrown into the novelty category.

I can see how some people might need this. There probably is a small group of grandparents, consultants, folks/soldiers living abroad who would want this because it is a nice service and lets them stay in touch but ultimately, it seems very fad'ish.

If Ryan is doing this as a philanthropic venture, kudos. It seems he is not because they are part of an incubator (remember that term from 1999?) based in Philadelphia called DreamIt Ventures.

Well folks - what do you think?

Anand Sanwal is the former Vice President, Investment Optimization and Strategic Business Analysis, at American Express where he built and led the company's corporate portfolio management effort managing several billion dollars per annum of discretionary investment spend. It is widely recognized as the most ambitious corporate portfolio management undertaking by a large- or mid-size corporation. He also oversaw the CFO's strategic planning group in addition to also leading the creation and management of the companyâ€™s inaugural $50MM Chairmanâ€™s Innovation Fund. He is the author of the book Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management: Aligning Investment Proposals with Strategy. He is a founder of consulting & advisory company Brilliont.

He speaks and consults frequently with research organizations and companies on the topics of innovation, corporate portfolio management and cost optimization and has worked with leading financial services, pharma, high-tech, healthcare and public sector institutions. His work has been featured in Business Finance Magazine, BPM Magazine, The Journal of Accounting & Finance, Baseline Magazine and The Deal amongst others. He graduated from the Wharton School of Business with a degree in Finance and Accounting and also has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. More info can be found at Brilliont or at his personal website. He can be reached at asanwal@brilliont.com.

As you can probably tell, Anand also enjoys writing descriptions about himself in the third person.

He is also involved with Brilliont spin-off ChubbyBrain - the world's largest user-generated database of innovative startups. In addition to delivering intelligent, well-structured information on startups, ChubbyBrain also encourages its members to provide expert insights and critiques of emerging business models, technologies and companies. Presently, the platform has over 13,000 startups and over 900 investors (VCs, angel investment groups, corporate venture groups and individuals) in our database.

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Insights, pragmatic discussion, and conversation about corporate portfolio management, innovation and cost optimization as well as ...
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Insights, pragmatic discussion, and conversation about corporate portfolio management, innovation and cost optimization as well as general business hilarity. Whether you call it enterprise portfolio management, IT portfolio management, project portfolio management, investment optimization or some other term, efforts at optimizing your resource allocation are key to long term organizational success.
I abhor unproductive complexity and am wary of many of the purported elixirs out there (most software 'solutions', scorecards, dashboards).
The insights in this blog are the result of work in the trenches building what is regarded as one of the most successful corporate portfolio management disciplines within a large organization at American Express.
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